Watch out for that tree!
Trip Start
Jan 09, 2007
1
5
11
Trip End
Jan 17, 2007
Santa Elena/Monteverde,
Costa Rica
Friday, January 12, 2007
Santa Elena is a kind of cute little town on the side of a mountain, with one main drag and a few other roads with cabins, hostels, and a World of Insects (I chose to skip that attraction). It is also very hard to leave, as the jaunt over to Tilaran, 27 miles away, takes three hours over windy dirt roads, and only about three buses leave every day, for which it is recommended to buy tickets 24 hours in advance.
After I scoped out the town, made a few calls back to the States (use the phones in front of the church, the ones in front of the super don´t work), and sent a fax from the tourist center, I went back to collect Sarah. Once I got there, I found that in the rain and wind and mud I´d lost the room key somewhere when a thing I´d thought was a pocket on my jacket wasn´t so much. Anticipating at least a glare, if not a huge fee, I confessed to the hotel manager, only to have him shrug it off and hand us his only remaining key. That would NEVER happen in the States. (And I´m not so sure it was wise, myself.) Ticos are so nice! Southern hospitality doesn't hold a candle to them.
We stopped for breakfast in the Treehouse Restaurant, a restaurant that was actually built around a giant tree. It was a little pricey for breakfast, but Santa Elena is a tourist town. At least there was a free half hour of internet with it.
The van picked us up for the canopy tour right across the street, where we met John-from-Boston, who´d escaped his tour group of old people to come do the zip-lines. The ride up to the cloud forest was fairly short, whereupon there was no waiting and they immediately started strapping us all into harnesses and helmets. It was confirmed once again I have an enormous head. The guy had to let mine out three times.
We trickled outside with our group - eleven people, I think, plus about five guides, and started climbing stairs up to the hanging bridge that led over to where the hike started. The guides gave us three rules 1. They would take care of the equiment. 2. How to stop or slow down. 3. What to do if you don´t have enough momentum and you get stuck on a line.
I hadn´t even really thought about the reality of doing the canopy tour until I started climbing higher and higher and higher, then walking up more stairs set into the forest floor, and I felt just a tickle of trepidation. This was compounded the further up we went and the more glimpses over the side I saw to the tops of trees underneath. I´m not afraid of heights, but sliding down half-mile long cables hundreds of meters above the ground gave me pause. Seeing the tops of the trees in the rain forest is a curious experience.
The first couple of people who went had done it before, so they knew what was going on, and the next group was three French girls, who hadn't. There was screaming. I was next, but once I got all buckled into the harness with the multiple safeties attached, it was more like a swing. If I happened to let go of the handles, absolutely nothing would happen to me, other than perhaps some swaying. And, just like hot-air ballooning, the moment I was actually in the air, it was just too awesome to be scared. Seeing the cloud forest spread out around me, and sliding under some of the more giant branches to land safely on a platform nestled in the trees gave me the urge to laugh more than anything, as I craned my neck to see as much as possible without wobbling the pulley. (A cloud forest is basically a giant rain forest shrounded in clouds.)
We went on this way for a few more practice cables, hiking from spot to spot, zipping, landing, and continuing on, getting higher and higher into the forest. Becoming used to the proper "zipping" position did take a little getting used to - you have to tuck in your knees up by your hands to make as compact a ball as possible, and cross your ankles. If there is too much wind resistance, the wind may stop you on the line. Being heavier helps, too, as you get more speed up. John-from-Boston had several crash landings, with the guides setting the stopping rope further and further forward for him. (He was six feet plus.) Eventually, we were out of the "practice" cables (practice only in that they were slightly shorter in less windy areas of the forest), and only one guy had managed to get himself hung up. He got laughed at by the guides.
Then it was time to climb the platform to the tallest line, and the wind had gotten bad again. The guides were attached by cables to the railings, so they wouldn't fall off as they were getting us attached to the line. As I was blown around on the platform when standing, a little bit of trepidation came back. It's one thing to slide around on a line, it's another to get buffeted by a strong wind down a much longer one. Turns out, I was worried for nothing. Don't get me wrong, as the lightest one, I did get stuck between two huge gusts of wind, and did not have enough momentum to reach the end of the line, so had to flip myself around backwards and crawl down the rest of the line hand over hand. But the guides didn't laugh at me. We're talking tropical storm speed winds, literally.
And after that? There was nothing else to worry about. Once you've been spider walking backwards down a line over a mile drop, nothing short of the cable breaking is going to scare you.
For the longest cable, which measured in at half a mile, they had us go in teams of two, so as to minimize hang ups. As I wasn't entirely sure how a team of two people flipped themselves around, I was glad when they decided I needed to go with one of the guides, rather than with Sarah. Even with a giant, running leap, no hands on the pulley itself, and wild swinging, the guide still could not get us across. We got caught by the increasingly wild wind, and I just am useless when it comes to providing weight and momentum. The best I could do was stay out of the way when we stopped several meters before the platform so he could swing around me like a monkey and pull us in. I wondered on the way back to Santa Elena how children ever managed it, because I could definitely see a five year old panicking when they skidded to a stop, and a kid wouldn't have the weight to get the momentum up, either. Well, as it turns out, there is a lower weight limit of 90 pounds, so there are probably not many five year olds caught swinging in the wind.
Zip-lining was definitely worth doing, and I was just disappointed I didn't have any time to see Monteverde on a slower walking pace. There was at least thirty or forty minutes of hiking included in the tour, but that just showed you a fraction of the park.
When we got back to Santa Elena, I made a beeline for the bus station to try to get tickets out of town early the next morning (success!), then we spent a little while souvenir shopping and ate again at the Treehouse. Around eight pm, pretty much everything in town had closed, and the wind was going absolutely wild again. I thought to myself before I went to bed "Less wind than this blew the roof off of the swimming complex at NAU once." This would turn out to be prescient.
